The home’s one-acre lot can be viewed from the back porch.

List Price: $1,995,000
Sale Price: $1,595,000
The Property: The rear of this 12-room house looks across a swimming pool and enormous back lawn toward a small lake (part of Ginger Creek) and, beyond that, to homes on the other side of the water. Approximately 35 years old, this house has a soaring peaked ceiling in the main living rooms, four bedrooms, and a walkout basement. But its key assets, says Mehri Briant, the Re/Max Elite agent who represented the sellers, are “the view of the water and [that] it’s in the Hinsdale high-school district.”

Teenage residents of some homes in Oak Brook’s prestigious Ginger Creek neighborhood attend Downers Grove North High School, while others go to Hinsdale Central, where taxes are lower and test scores higher. In Chicago’s October 2007 study of Chicago-area public high schools, Hinsdale Central’s score for test results as a function of money spent per pupil was more than twice the score for Downers Grove North. Briant estimates that the high-school situation amounted to at least a $200,000 boost in the ultimate sale price of this home. She says a comparable house on the Downers Grove North side of the line sold recently for $1,135,000.

The house’s unprepossessing 1960s Contemporary design is out of sync with more recently built Ginger Creek homes; those tend toward larger and more ornate styles. Several original homes of the same vintage as this one have been torn down and replaced. This home, says Briant, could suffer the same fate because its one-acre lot is so fantastic, but the new owners “have not decided what to do with the house.” Not identified in public records of the sale, those buyers, says Briant, are Oak Brook residents “who wanted that piece of property.”

Price Points: The sellers, Carlo and Tamsen DiCarlo, had bought the house in 1998 for $1,048,950, according to DuPage County records. They listed it for sale with Briant and her husband, Robert, in early January 2008, and within three weeks they had four offers. “They rejected all of them,” Briant says. There were few offers in the subsequent months, and in August, the family who had made one of the lowest of the original quartet of offers came back with the same number they had tried in January. This time, Briant says, her client “was ready to sell.” They had a contract in August, but the deal did not close until December 15th. I could not reach the sellers for comment.

Listing Agents: Mehri and Robert Briant, Re/Max Elite, 630-655-2300; mehri_briant@yahoo.com and bob_briant@yahoo.com